Here are some burn-in photos of the S1k lighting job we have been sharing.  This is only 33% of them its going to be very bright in the loft!

This is a test…

Each LED cluster is tested just after being soldered to ensure a good connection, proper installation and of course that they work. I’d explain more but I’m not allowed to and don’t have the time. Lots more clusters to make!!!

LED’s everywhere!

Lots of tiny clusters to be built. Behind the soldering iron is pile of a few THOUSAND LED’s to be assembled into a mysterious, functional project for one of our great clients. We can’t wait ‘till it’s all done and we can share the full scope of this one!

Behold! Yet another strange contraption!

This is a modified arbor press, which we are going to use to crimp electrical connectors onto brass tubes (yes, the same brass tubes that we previously powder coated).

These arbor presses are great. ENCO sells them for $25.95!! Seriously! Being so cheap, they make a great starting point for any number of different types of assembly tools, as long as they require a pressing motion. Also, they are made of really cheap Chinese cast iron, so they are really easy to mill and drill into!

The red-handled gizmo is a toggle clamp. Toggle clamps are really neat. That little clamp will exert 100 lbs. of clamping force, yet only takes a couple of pounds of force to lock into place. The other great thing about these clamps is that when you open them up they swing completely out of the way, making it very easy to load and unload parts.

And once again, I still cannot yet tell you what this is for. I’m sorry. It won’t be too much longer now.

Here’s the whole soldering jig for the big Studio1Thousand project, finally!

Sometimes it seems easier to just cobble things together, or do things the shady way. When it gets to the point where you have to do something over and over, thousands of times, you have to make fixtures or jigs to help you get it done. It’s not only important to help you do the work more quickly, but also to help ensure that errors are reduced to an acceptable level. You really don’t want to get 1,000 pieces into a manufacturing run, only to find out that one person has been doing their work in a slightly different way than everyone else…

Again, can’t exactly tell you what these are for yet, but we will definitely post up some photos when the project is public!

This is approximately half of a soldering jig built for the assembly of the big lighting project we are doing for Studio1Thousand. Can’t really divulge more about the project until it is public, but suffice it to say that these jigs will really come in handy while soldering up the nearly 10,000 LEDs…

Here’s the full-size version of that powder coating fixture we built for a large project with Studio1Thousand. 1,800 of these little brass tubes get coated with a Tiger Coatings series 44 flat black matte powder, while the ends remain bare for soldering. Coating this many tubes is time consuming no matter how you do it, but the alternative to this fixture is to manually wrap each end of each tube with the appropriate width of high-temp masking tape…that is a soul-crushing job that I would wish on no one.

Small-scale prototype of a fixture for powder coating brass tubes. The silver aluminum frame has holes of a precise depth drilled in it to capture the tubes. The powder only deposits on the parts which aren’t masked by the fixture, leaving bare brass areas that can be soldered to.

More pics to come when this one goes full-scale.